Join us for the launch of Working Conversations? a series of educational videos produced through a partnership between Implicated Theatre and London Metropolitan University as part of the IR Multiling project.

Members of Implicated Theatre and UNITE union worked together with researchers from London Metropolitan University to devise and produce six films aimed at migrant workers highlighting different issues they might face working in Europe today.

The films are translated into six languages and are designed to be used in training with migrant workers, trade unions and other organisations promoting good practice in industrial relations with migrant workers.

This open workshop will introduce the films, and how they can be used for members of UNITE’s Migrant Workers Education Programme.

The IR Multiling project was funded for two years by the EU and was aimed at researching multilingualism at work and its impact on industrial relations in six European countries: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the UK. The project focused on migrant workers and, in particular the role of trade unions. London Metropolitan University was the UK partner who launched their research 28 November, 2016.

Applications are now open to participate in a training and research project for ESOL teachers to pilot and develop a six week ESOL + Theatre of the Oppressed course.

Language, Resistance, Theatre is a project by the Serpentine Galleries Edgware Road Project, where participatory ESOL teachers and Implicated Theatre (a Theatre of the Oppressed collective led by director Frances Rifkin) work with language learners to develop a more political ESOL approach that combines language with a focus on resistance.

Last year we ran a free workshop series for English language learners bringing theatre and language experts together to experiment with different ideas. Following that 8 week pilot project, which aimed to work with second language speakers to combine Boal inspired Theatre of the Oppressed work with language development, we will be launching a series of training sessions and inviting interested teachers to pilot a six week course in their own classrooms. From September 2016 we will be working towards creating a resource materials for ESOL teachers to be launched at the end of the year. A report about the pilot project by Becky Winstanley is available to download here.

We will be holding open training for ESOL teachers interested in learning more about the project and Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, as well as two workshops where participants will begin to practice bringing these techniques into a classroom setting.

Theatre of the Oppressed in the ESOL classroom 1 – Saturday 24th September 2016

Theatre of the Oppressed in the ESOL classroom 2 – Saturday 8th October 2016

Core teachers:

We are recruiting a core team of experienced ESOL teachers who want to be involved in classroom based action research which will contribute to a resource pack or curriculum for other ESOL teachers combining Theatre of the Oppressed and ESOL. This will involve a SIX WEEK commitment to teaching the course in your own classroom, accompanied by a Theatre of the Oppressed mentor as well as attending and writing weekly reflections and contributing to the editing of the final resource pack or curriculum. Commitment to teaching must occur between October 2016 – November 2016

The curriculum is based on knowledge produced during the Edgware Road Project at St Marylebone CE School, a Performing and Visual Arts multi faith Church of England School in West London. The project was a four-year residency that took place between 2009-2013, in which the art collective Ultra-Red worked in the context of the school and the neighbourhood, involving teachers, administrators, students and local activists

In a moment where the arts are being systematically removed from the education system, the authors will discuss the collaboration, what it means to have artists in residence in schools, and the benefits and challenges that the introduction of radical education approaches brought to the school. The development of the curriculum comes from the desire to share approaches and strategies with more teachers and students, as well as the need to reflect on the legacy of the project and how it has influenced the practices of teachers at the school today.

This publication is part of the pamphlet series Studies on a Road that document projects commissioned through the Serpentine Galleries’ Edgware Road Project.

Stephanie Cubbin is an Artist and Educator that has been at St Marylebone School since 2001. Stephanie now works as an educational consultant for St Marylebone Teaching School alongside teaching and has supported many heads of departments developing their curriculum, improving results and supporting middle leadership. She advises on policy implementation and attends the All Party Parliamentary Group for Art & Design Education.

Janna Graham is a writer, organizer, educator, and curator who has initiated community, pedagogical, artistic, and research projects in and outside of the arts for many years. Prior to her current appointment as Head of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, Graham was a curator at Serpentine Gallery in London, where she worked with others to create The Centre for Possible Studies, an artistic residency, community research space, and popular education program in the Edgware Road neighbourhood. There, artists and local people developed “studies of the possible” in response to the social inequalities of urban space. She also ran a three-year program of artists working in care contexts, culminating in the recent publication Art + Care: A Future (2013) to which she contributed. Graham is also a member of the international sound and political collective Ultra-red and has been an artist, researcher, and educator at institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Plymouth Art Centre, Plymouth.

Chris Jones is a member of Ultra-red and the long-standing community social centre and archive 56a Infoshop in The Elephant. As part of the Edgware Rd Project Chris spent many hours with pupils of St Marylebone investigating together what it means to be a pupil in the current policy-led overdrive for vocation and career. They also worked through issues of work, regeneration and migration through free-from work experience and curriculum based investigative processes using sound and collective listening.

Who are you when you work?
What happens to your story?
What remains visible?
What do you see when you are watching someone work?
What is visible behind the tray?
Here are the stories on the other side of the tray.

Implicated Theatre, present a participatory evening of theatrical interventions and sound compositions developed from a year-long collaboration with unionised migrant hotel workers from Unite’s Hotel Workers Branch. The sound piece accompanying the performance, is a sketch working towards a possible Radio Ballad, taking its cue from Charles Parker’s original BBC Radio Ballads a series that aired from 1958-64.

Please wear comfortable footwear because the performance will be interactive.

Implicated Theatre has been working since October 2011 on a series of workshops and performances forming part of their residency with the Serpentine Galleries’ Edgware Road Project. Instigated by artists from no.w.here and working with theatre director Frances Rifkin, the experimental workshops explore the relationships between political speech and action, the self and the collective, voice and silence. Forming close relationships with migrant’s rights groups and unions, Implicated Theatre creates theatrical interventions inspired by real-life struggle, and highlighting issues of social justice.

Patrick Farmer is the co-founder of the online curatorial platform, Compost and Height, co-editor of the new-music journal, Wolf Notes. Curator of Sound I’m Particular lecture series, and Significant Landscapes Festival. Published four books and written compositions for groups such as Apartment House and the Set Ensemble. Performed and exhibited internationally with artists such as Angharad Davies, Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hughes, and Jason Kahn. Festival appearances and residencies include Audiograft (Oxford), The Wulf (Los Angeles), LMC (London), I & E (Dublin), Geiger (Gothenberg), Blurred Edges (Hamburg), Forestry Commission England (Cumbria), Q-O2 (Belgium) and MOKS (Estonia).Work has been released on labels such as Another Timbre, Nadukeenumono, and Winds Measure. Current work looks at the nature of the arbitrary; writing compositions that primarily focus on the sound producing means rather than the sound itself, often utilising more and more fantastical methods to create sounds that are themselves, wonderfully ordinary.

Frances Rifkin artistic director of Utopia Arts, is a cultural worker and director in Political and Community theatre. In the 1970s she was director of Recreation Ground Theatre Company and in the 1980s she was director of Banner Theatre, Birmingham and participated as a theatre activist in the anti-fascist movements, disputes and strikes of the time. She trained extensively with Augusto Boal in the early 1990s and works as a workshop leader. Between 1992 and 1997, she was lecturer in Community and workshop theatre in Theatre Studies at Warwick and Lancaster Universities. Since 2011 she has been working with the Serpentine Galleries’ Edgware Road Project as the director of Implicated Theatre.

Please join us to launch the Church Street Local Projects Shelf, a community-run bookshelf for Church Street Library.

The Local Projects Shelf will feature the many projects and publications about the Church Street and Edgware Road area and will exist as a growing archive of the neighbourhood.

The shelf was born out of the need to share the vast amount of materials produced by art organisations, academic institutions, individual practitioners and researchers about the neighbourhood, with the public that constitutes it. The shelf is designed by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, and invites donations of any publications or materials about the area.

Coinciding with the launch of the Local Projects Shelf, the event will launch Studies on a Road, a series of pamphlets documenting projects commissioned through the Serpentine Galleries’ Edgware Road Project as well as Action of Street/Action of Room a publication by students from Westminster Academy and artists Febrik.

Publication contributors will discuss their projects and we will share our experiences of living and working in the neighbourhood over food from the market.

Please bring a publication to donate to the Local Projects Shelf if you can!

ACT ESOL is a project by the Serpentine Galleries Edgware Road Project, where participatory ESOL teachers and Implicated Theatre work with language learners to develop a more political ESOL approach that combines language with a focus on resistance.

Following the devastating impact that cuts and aggressive immigration policies have had on mainstream, government funded ESOL provision, political ESOL projects such as this are timely and much needed. Implicated Theatre ran an 8 week pilot project in Spring 2015, which aimed to work with second language speakers to combine Boal inspired Theatre of the Oppressed work with language development. Participants enrolled on the course to learn new performance skills and use the theatre as a context to develop their English language skills.

Experiences of migration in relation to language were not necessarily explored adequately in previous Implicated Theatre workshops. And although many teachers successfully use drama techniques in their ESOL work, few are familiar with the complexity and transformational potential of Theatre of the Oppressed.

The idea emerged to create a course specifically for Theatre of the Oppressed with English and to pilot a project with theatre and language experts working together to experiment with different ideas. Implicated Theatre worked with the Migrants Resources Centre and English for Action to establish the project which became ACT ESOL.

As the project continues and we work towards creating a resource for ESOL teachers to be launched at the end of the year, join us for the discussion where we will be launching an interim report by English for Action’s Becky Winstanley, that describes the work we did during the pilot of the ACT ESOL project but also hopes to inspire other teachers to try out and develop this work in their own contexts. The digital version of the report will be available to download in early May.

Becky Winstanley is an experienced ESOL teacher and teacher educator working in Tower Hamlets. Her particular areas of interest include participatory approaches to education, language and migration and language and literacy development for social change. She worked on Actionaid’s Reflect ESOL project, adapting the international Reflect model for language learning in the UK and trained with Reflect practitioners in Liberia. She has been an active trade unionist for many years and is interested in teachers’ and students’ struggles in education and beyond

English for Action (EFA) London provides English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses for migrant communities across London. Our aim is to reach people who may be excluded from mainstream ESOL courses. We believe that ESOL classes, with the correct focus, can enable migrants to access the social, economic and political benefits that would be out of reach without language training and support. – See more at:

Implicated Theatre have worked since October 2011 including collaborations with the Migrants Resource Centre, UNITE’s Hotel Workers union and Justice for Domestic Workers with theatre director Frances Rifkin. The experimental workshops explore the relationships between political speech and action, the self and the collective, voice and silence. Forming close relationships with migrant’s rights groups and unions, Implicated Theatre creates theatrical interventions inspired by real-life struggle, and highlighting issues of social justice.

no.w.here were in residence with the Edgware Road Project for 4 years and were founding artists of Serpentine Galleries’ Implicated Theatre.

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This petition is vital as no.w.here joins a long list of grassroots community spaces, homes and hospitals facing eviction in London. For 10 years no.w.here has worked in Tower Hamlets as a not for profit community project, open artist platform and film laboratory built on the historical legacy of the London filmmakers co-operative. Run by cultural workers who place value on education, resistance, collaboration and free expression, no.w.here’s future is under threat from a tidal wave of property developers. Vital in its community, no.w.here does not view displacement by billionaires or the destruction of communities as a natural evolution.

What is happening?

“The day after the election, the capital’s luxury flat market soared, as the global elite rushed to buy a piece of ‘real’ London life”. The Guardian 30 May 2015

no.w.here was renewing it’s 9 year lease, as the Tory election win triggered a wave of property development speculation across London. Enquiries for our building led to the landlord closing down lease conversations, the building is now receiving development bids, no.w.here and three local businesses face eviction. In response no.w.here applied for and was granted legal status as an Asset of Community Value (ACV). This ACV status is now being appealed by the landlord.

A Stage for Any Revolution was an open modular ‘stage’ by artist Alia Farid based on an architectural model from 1929 by constructivist set designer, Victor Shestakov. The stage, re-envisaged for Edgware Road was used by the public in different ways; for long-distance participation in events happening across the Arab world, for sitting together to share discussions, for making declarations or speeches, for convening groups of people, and hosting events.

On 11 July, Alia Farid will launch the stage with a performance of Zoe Leonard’s I want a President… in Arabic and English. This collective reading is part of an ongoing project initiated by artists Malin Arnell, Kajsa Dahlberg, Johanna Gustavsson and Fia-Stina Sandlund in collaboration with artist Zoe Leonard.

To mark the launch of Bright Echo, Sophia Al-Maria responded to Alia Farid’s A Stage for Any Revolution by organising Acts of Memory – Tyburnia, a performance of Monica Ross’ original piece Anniversary – an act of memory which is a collective, multilingual recitation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Acts of Memory – Tyburnia was performed at 3.30pm on 18 July at Nutford Place.

Sophia Al-Maria is a writer who lives in London now. In 2012 her first book, The Girl Who Fell to Earth received high praise in the United States from The New York Times to Elle Magazine andis being published in Arabic as Between the Earth and the Sky this year. In January 2015 Sophia was selected for the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting Lab where she worshipped her Egyptian revenge thriller, Beretta. Her first solo show Virgin with a Memory at Manchester’s Cornerhouse drew on the subject matter of the film and the un-making of it.